A novel, in flash fiction style, Pipette starts with a woman on a train returning from the ballet, to her dogs, her partner.

Trouble at home escalates. The country is on edge. She tries to escape a threatening situation.  Then comes a pandemic; our protagonist hangs out with her dogs, manages remote teaching.

With leitmotifs of skiing, dogs, trains, waterways, birds, nature, spiritual guides, triathlons, she writes, she teaches, she swims/bikes/runs. The novel dips into her past—trauma, relationships, activities, working in the lab—which pendulums, then finally propels forward.

Pipette was include in IndiReader’s list of Best Reviewed Books, October, 2022.  Also see the very nice review by David Reyes for The Book Commentary  and an interview with Lisa Haselton.

Distributed by Itasca Books.

(A novel)

Every family’s past is Gettysburg, Eliza Schnable Friday discovers:  the battlefield of a legendary civil war where truth is the first casualty.  To rescue the wounded and bury the dead, Eliza must use every weapon in her arsenal—fierce devotion, uncompromising integrity, and regional pride.  Like Lee Smith’s Appalachian novels, Allegheny Dream alternates between a physical terrain of mountains and forests and an imaginary landscape lit by flashes of prophecy and echoing with ancestral voices. (Anthony Di Renzo)

Ruth is not exactly a conventional sequel to his novel Lucchesi and the Whale. Lentricchia has included two characters from the first book—the vaguely autobiographical protagonist, writer Thomas Lucchesi, and Ruth Cohen, who appeared briefly as a flight attendant in a dream sequence in Lucchesi, but who now, as a photographer and the writer’s wife, shares narration duties; otherwise the book takes off in new directions.

Interlacing the narrative with flashbacks, the story follows the couple from Utica, New York (Lentricchia’s hometown), to secluded “Ninth Lake” in upstate New York, and eventually to Baghdad. Where Lucchesi was an abstract musing—equal parts novel and lit crit focusing heavily on the writer’s own experience of Moby-Dick—Ruth is more plot driven.

Beginning with the true tragedy of the grounding of the “Golden Venture” off Rockaway Beach, Queens, NY on June 7th, 1992, during which ten illegal Chinese immigrants from Fujin drowned, the director travels the world, loosely following the path of the ship back to Africa and then Asia, documenting the realities of people smuggling. On a deeper level, Buckner’s director struggles to balance the strictness of documenting fact with the commercial need to produce entertainment and the fact that he’s often not present to film the true story. So to what extent can he manipulate what is happening? A hopeful book, The Origins of Solitude presents the serious reader with a different take on a global problem.

This is the first Ravenna Press edition of Wilson’s novel, a cult favorite originally published in 1987 by Knopf, with a new Introduction by Marc Kipniss. Published alongside his short story collection, Sonja’s Blue, these books are interesting evidence in the controversy over the influence of former Knopf editor Gordon Lish (who edited The Red Truck but not the short stories.) Lish edited Wilson as he edited Raymond Carver, with dazzling results that may be compared to the author’s original and unedited writing in Sonja’s Blue.  (Currently out of stock; may be purchased via Kindle on Amazon for $4.99)

A Bahamian novel of adventure and conflict that explores the nature of class and identity in the post-colonial world through a narrative rich in imagery and told in confident, graceful prose that reveals the inner lives of the characters and implicates us all in one man’s struggle to do the right thing.

Narrated in part by a ghost, when the dust finally settles is a novel focused on land, loyalty and racial politics in the 1968 South. Mawatuck County (also the setting for Mead’s The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan) is a place where the present continually collides with the past, a fact underscored by one unseasonably hot, dry week in May. Mabel Stallings is determined to make her grandchild love the family farm as much as she does. Clarence Carter is determined to escape paying taxes by “playing” crazy. Harrison Doxey, a black student in a white majority high school, is determined to dance and drink at The Lido, a whites-only dance hall at the beach.